Thursday, August 7, 2014

KISS Your Design

I’ve seen a
fair share of prototypes presented by first time designers. Usually, I’ve seen
them while attending gaming conventions and since I will undoubtedly see a few
more within the next few days, as Avangarda - one of the biggest conventions in
Poland - starts on the day this article goes live, I felt prompted to share a
few thoughts about one of the fairly aspects some people may find important when designing your own
game.

Image source: BoardGameGeek

If I were
to point out a few tendencies among the prototypes I’ve seen on conventions,
one of them would definitely be a high level of complexity. It’s actually only
natural – most first time designers are gamers, some of them inspired by a thought
of rebuilding a game they've played into a more interesting, more realistic and –
consequently – more complex design.

Let me stop
here for a second to say that there is nothing wrong with complexity. Legendary
games such as Twilight Imperium or Here I Stand are notoriously complex (and
long) and there is nothing inherently wrong with that (well, maybe apart from
the length). However, before using them as a simple justification, you should
really first examine if your design also needs a high complexity level
because, frankly, quite often it does not.

Image source: BoardGameGeek

Imagine, if
you will, that you want to make a game of your own. A turn-based, “nothing
fancy” resource collection and engine optimization design that would allow
players to perform a limited number of actions per turn out of a selection of
nine. For ease let’s just number them and proceed to some of the rules
governing their use.

Let’s say
that every player performs one action per turn (until they use their allotment
of three) and that actions can only be performed a limited number of times per
round: with actions 1-3 being available once, actions 4-6 twice, and actions
7-9 available up to three times during a single round. Let’s also assume that
there is a specific order to the actions: that action 1 must be always
performed before 2, then 2 before 3 etc., unless, of course, some of them are
skipped, because the players are not interested in them during a given round.
To finish off, let’s add another system: unused actions become more valuable
with every new round.

Image source: BoardGameGeek

The above
system in its rough form is complicated. It would require a detailed
explanation, a good player aid and a bunch of people willing to learn its
intricacies to actually work. However, if you’re not new to designer games, you’ve
already probably figured out that the best way to actually put it in a game
would be to use the worker placement mechanism – much like the one used in
Carson City or (slightly more recently) in Snowdonia. Just give each player a
number of pawns signifying their available number of actions and place the
action spaces themselves on a track that would govern the order of their
execution.

In truth, I
have no idea if worker placement as a mechanism came to be via a process
similar to the one above. I would actually wager money that it did not. I
However, I hope it served as a simple illustration of how some things in games
can easily be made simpler. As I said, complexity in itself is not a bad thing,
but before you decide to make your design very complex, and before you say that
your game will lose something if you try to streamline it, be reasonably sure
that there isn’t a way that will make it easier on your future players and
virtually the same when it comes to the feel of the game and the number of
options it provides. I assure you that in most cases it’s not a difficult thing
to just keep it simple.